Health Care Solution

As a family member with several cell base diseases I was delighted to read The Capital Times’ recent guest column, “FTC fighting deals to keep generic drugs off shelves.” Federal Trade Commissioner, Jon Leibowitz wrote, “Getting health care costs under control is a daunting and multifaceted challenge.”

He then went on to report how pharmaceutical companies collude with their competitors to keep lower generic alternatives to prescription drugs off the market and how the commission plans to ban such “pay-for-delay” settlements.

Leibowitz is challenging all citizens and health care consumers who are waiting for a single payer universal health care plan to arrive must meanwhile continue to take steps to

bring about more accessible and affordable health care to all our citizens. In this spirit I want to propose another simple approach that would save health care consumers billions of dollars annually.

Stop federal and state funding of biotech research and development companies without providing public health care benefit safeguards to ensure that stem cell derived cures and medications will be accessible and affordable to all Wisconsin citizens.

To date we have been promised only indirect trickle-down economic effects, including more jobs and a higher tax base from our support. While this is a worthy and much needed economic benefit, it alone is far too narrow and short sighted. If Wisconsin is to effectively manage its ever escalating and exorbitant health care costs we must act now.

A genuine public health care benefit for public funding of stem cell research can range from a percentage of biotech profits beyond a certain threshold to simply ensuring that drug costs and other stem therapies in Wisconsin will be managed and made at reasonable costs to all our citizens. Other public interests policy concerns have to do with whether medication discounts are to be given to low and medium income patients and other underserved groups?

Will Wisconsin taxpayers have any say to help ensure that such stem cell funding targets  prioritized disease groups such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes and sickle cell anemia versus pursuing products that have only short-term commercial and cosmetic benefits?

Millions of our state tax dollars have already been spent and more have been added to this year’s biennium budget without any such consumer safeguards.  State innovation grants, tax credits and a host of other public financial incentives are being invested and now are in the state administrative pipeline.

Asking grantees to do the right thing after giving away the farm is like asking the fox to cough up the chickens after giving him the key to the hen house. If these stem cell policy concerns are not already on your civic or health care organization’s radar screen and advocacy agenda such neglect could be catastrophic for Wisconsin health care consumers.

The fundamental policy questions that you and your organization should be asking is should your organization support legislation for federal and state funding of stem cell research with public health care payback safeguards?

Respectfully yours,

William R. Benedict,

Madison.

Countering the effects of early childhood trauma

The Capital Times - Guest Column - October 20, 2012

Conservative columnist David Brooks, in his most recent 9/7/12 editorial in the New York Times discusses how early childhood traumas and risk factors sew the seeds of later physical and behavioral problems in adults. His solution was for much greater coordination and cooperation of all those who serve our youngest children.

To continue this early neglect of our youngest citizens that ultimately results each year in billions of dollars being spent in treating our most chronically ill adults is perhaps the number one reason for our country’s ever growing health care crisis.  

Fortunately for American taxpayer, Obama’s administration, his Department of Health and Human Services, and its Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration have already recognized this health and economic reality and have a sound and comprehensive solution to this ballooning health care crisis.

Called Project Launch, simply stated, the health and future prosperity of our country requires a greater investment in the physical and emotional health of our youngest children. The project presently consists of 35 communities who are pioneering new ways to promote and sustain young child wellness. The project’s target is children from birth through 8. The goal is for all children to reach their physical, social, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive milestones.

Project Launch has five prevention and promotional strategies. These strategies should be upper most in the mind of every taxpayer who goes to the polls in November. If you are a citizen and taxpayer and concerned about the ever spiraling costs of health care and your increasing health insurance costs, support the present Administration. Your vote will mean that your supporting the continuation of  the following actions to end our health care crisis:

1. Health screening and assessments for every child birth through 8.
2. Integrate behavioral health care into primary health care settings.
3. Mental health consultation in all early child care and education settings.
4. Increasing focus on social and emotional well being.
5. Expand use of culturally-relevant evidenced-based prevention and wellness practices.

See you at the polls!

Benedict is a mental health reform advocate and blogs at danecountyalmanac.blogspot.com

Administration concerned with patient outcomes

Wisconsin State Journal - Opinion/Your Views

As a member of the Wisconsin Council on Mental Health and as one who has spent nearly a lifetime trying to introduce patient treatment outcomes technology into mental health organizations, I was distressed to see the editors of the Sunday Journal fail to describe President Obama’s already significant efforts in this regard.  But instead, they stated that his administration and the existing affordable health care act have only “dabbled” with this concept. This simply is not true. In fact Obama is and has been a strong advocate and spokesman for moving our health care forward from presently measuring and funding service volume to measuring and paying for patient treatment effectiveness outcomes.

Our readers and voters will be better informed by Googling SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration), Strategic Initiative #7: Outcomes and Quality, Department of Health and Human Services.

Hopefully when the moderator of the upcoming debate this week between the President and Gov. Romney asks which candidate has done the most to change the focus of health care for the better, readers of the Journal will have already completed their homework.

Benedict blogs at danecountyalmanac.com

New union will strengthen mental health services

The Capital Times

The shock waves caused by Wisconsin’s history-making citizen protests are becoming increasingly evident. It clearly acted as a tipping point for the mental health employees at Journey Mental Health Center (formerly the Mental Health Center of Dane County) when both clinical and support staff reached a breaking point with management, and decided that they needed greater empowerment and a louder voice.

After a ten month Journey campaign the National Labor Relations Board in Milwaukee, who conducted the election, recently reported that seventy-two percent of the professional staff and 54% of support staff at Journey voting, supported unionization with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

While recognizing management’s commitment to serving increasing numbers of underserved clients, there was disagreement in how best to do this. Many Journey employees believed that management seemed content to define the therapists’ professional autonomy and best practice expertise too narrowly. Staff complained that management often ignored broad clinician input before initiating new client access and case management practices, such as higher caseloads and related quality care issues.

Staff pushback to confront ever increasing job add-ons and productivity pressures were also ignored. Bread and butter issues such as salary and benefit increases, however, were far down the list of concerns expressed. Paramount was staff’s demand to be heard and to be seen as important collaborators with specialized knowledge and skills to share. “We have the right and responsibility to express our opinions,” one staffer emphasized in a recent radio interview.

 Newsletters helped inform all 300+ staff about the pros and cons of the union. This information prompted discussions and debate at the agency’s nine separate workplaces. Gradually unions were viewed by most staff as an effective means of addressing their concerns.

Without a union presence top down management structures in organizations are common. It’s increasingly clear that a union can help bring up everybody in the organization. Every employee has a voice and can make a contribution.

 Every organization has both an instrumental and expressive side. The former is concerned largely with the financial resources of the agency while the expressive or social side requires more diverse staff knowledge and skill sets, including both relationship and solidarity building skills. Owing to their professional training, these interactive and community-building skills can often best be found within the clinical staff. An agency or program manager who glibly dismisses this powerful resource does so at his/her own peril. Union/management committees can help insure that all staff resources are used in the most balanced, effective and efficient manner.

After learning of the election results, those who led this effort expressed hope that their success will be an inspiration to other mental health professionals and service agencies.

The Journey Mental Health Center has a stellar and nationally recognized mental health program. It has established a brilliant record of serving the serious mentally ill while at the same time has demonstrated the capacity to serve a broad and diverse clientele. It continues to pioneer new and innovative regimens of care and treatment strategies.

As a mental health professional and program evaluator for over thirty years, I am convinced that unionization at Journey will only serve to strengthen an already outstanding mental health program.

William R. Benedict
Mental Health Advocate
Danecountyalmanac.blogspot.com

Letter to the editor

As a patient advocate for mental health reform I want to alert readers and mental health consumers to the recent action by the American Psychiatric Association to use trademark and intellectual property rights to unfairly repress and censor individuals and the concerned public from being informed and engaged in the process of revising the current Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM5).

Inasmuch as this manual is used to diagnose and assign a psychiatric diagnoses label to citizens seeking mental health care and for the purpose of complying with federal and state insurance laws, and inasmuch as this process affects mental health policy and the amount and use of scarce public and private mental health resources, this process needs to be totally transparent and open to the public.

If you agree, please contact the Wisconsin Council on Mental Health and/or your local branch of Wisconsin’s National Alliance on Mental Health.

For more information Google DSM5/Psychology Today, or follow this issue on my blog: danecountyalmanac.blogspot. com.

William R. Benedict, Madison
DSM revision

New Mental Health Model is Good News

There is a new intellectual framework recently arrived within the psychiatric profession that will dramatically affect the way we will think about mental health in the decades ahead. It’s called “interpersonal neurobiology.”

In this new mental health science our mind is seen as being derived from the interaction of the brain and interpersonal processes, especially in our early development. Because this new science is more broadly based on both biological and social science research, it becomes a much more integrated medical discipline. The present molecular or psycho-pharmacological emphasis alone is no longer sufficient.

Perhaps the most significant and salient finding from recent neural science research is best expressed by the principal architect, Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, in Mindsight – The New Science of Personal Transformation. Siegel states:

“Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain’s structure and function.
There is no need to choose between brain or mind, biology or experience, nature or nurture. These divisions are unhelpful and inhibit clear thinking about an important and complex subject: the developing brain.”

While our genes remain an important component of our mental functioning, developmental factors are also significant and continue throughout the life span. For example, recent neural research, including the latest brain scanning technology, shows that learning produces physical alterations both in gene expression, brain structure and functioning. Thus human interaction both shapes and is shaped by an ever-changing and dynamic brain throughout life.

The corollary is that heredity alone does not necessarily need to be perceived as a permanent condition and that human experience throughout the life span has the potential to modify, neutralize and repair both constitutional and psychosocial determinants. Such life-long brain plasticity findings can bring hope to millions who are seeking healing and daily transformation.

These latest neural findings have long-term mental health policy and funding implications for persons suffering with serious chronic mental diseases. With modern brain scanning technology and ever-increasing neural evidence that supports an ever-changing brain ---whether psychopharmacological and/or psychosocial therapeutically induced --- it now becomes morally necessary to consider scheduling major periodic psychiatric and/or neurological exams for persons suffering from “chronic” mental illness.

Persons suffering from “chronic” mental disorders should not be stuck with old dead-end and long-term diagnoses but regularly and comprehensively reviewed in the light of these latest neural science findings.

That not all schizophrenic patients need to be on antipsychotics all their lives was recently rigorously demonstrated in Dr. Martin Harrow’s fifteen year old long-term, evidenced based, outcome study conducted at the Illinois College of Medicine.

Based on 68 young patients, and using global assessment scales at three year intervals, forty percent of those off medications recovered over the long run compared to only five percent of those still taking antipsychotics.

These research findings, presented at the 2008 American Psychiatric Association meeting, are presented in both readable and graphic form in Robert Whitaker’s “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” along with fourteen other long-term, evidenced based, outcome study findings which further support Harrow’s findings.

This will be welcome news to younger patients and their parents, and will bring hope especially to our youngest love ones.

Mental health policy makers and practitioners who are in search of a more open, holistic and balanced mental health model will also find both Siegel and Harrow’s work a valuable addition to their therapeutic literature.

Readers can learn more at Mindgains.org and MindsightInstitute.com
and at Robert Whitaker’s Psychology Today’s blog.

Benedict is a family mental health reform advocate

New Mental Health Paradigm is Good News

Capital Times, Saturday, June 18, 2011

There is a new intellectual framework recently arrived within the psychiatric profession that will dramatically affect the way we will think about mental health in the decades ahead. It’s called “Interpersonal Neurobiology.”

In this new mental health science our mind is seen as being derived from the interaction of the brain and interpersonal processes, especially in our early development. Because this new science is more broadly based on both biological and social science research, it becomes a much more integrated medical discipline. The present molecular or psycho-pharmacological emphasis alone is no longer sufficient.

Perhaps the most significant and salient finding from recent neural science research is best expressed by the principal architect, Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, in Mindsight – The New Science of Personal Transformation. Siegel states:

“Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain’s structure and function. There is no need to choose between brain or mind, biology or experience, nature or nurture. These divisions are unhelpful and inhibit clear thinking about an important and complex subject: the developing brain.”

While our genes remain an important component of our mental functioning, developmental factors are also significant and continue throughout the life span. For example, recent neural research shows that learning produces alterations in gene expression and in our synapses. Thus human interaction both shapes and is shaped by an ever-changing and dynamic brain throughout life.

The corollary is that heredity alone does not necessarily need to be perceived as a permanent condition and that human experience throughout the life span has the potential to modify, neutralize and repair constitutional determinants. Such life-long brain plasticity findings can bring hope to millions who are seeking healing and daily transformation.

These latest neural findings have long-term policy and funding implications for long-term mental health care of persons with serious chronic mental diseases. With modern brain scanning technology and ever-growing neural evidence that supports an ever-changing brain -- whether psycho-pharmacological and/or psycho therapeutically induced -- it now becomes morally necessary to consider scheduling major periodic psychiatric and/or neurological exams for persons suffering from “chronic” mental illness.

Persons suffering from “chronic” mental disorders should not be stuck with old dead-end and long-term diagnoses but regularly and comprehensively reviewed in the light of these latest neural science findings.

These findings presented in readily readable form, will be welcome news to those who daily suffer from mental disorders and their families, and for mental health practitioners who are in search of a more open and holistic and balanced therapy strategy.

Readers can learn more at Mindgains.org and MindsightInstitute.com.

Benedict is a family mental health reform advocate.